Followers

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Historically August has been one of my best months, but in recent years, not so much. My theory is that because we usually go to the coast in June or July, and I work so hard and produce so many pages down there that it wears me out for the rest of the summer. That seems to have held true this year, because my total for August was 352 pages, or just a little under half of what I did in June. Granted, June was my all-time best month, but still . . . I spent a solid week this month working on writing-related projects that didn't produce any new pages, and that hurt my total as well. But there's no doubt I've slowed down, and it looks unlikely that I'll hit 6000 pages this year, as I was trying to do. Of course, there's a good reason I've made it to 6000 only twice in my career: it's hard.I'm not going to obsess about this, though. (Too late!) I'm not as far behind on my schedule as I've been at times in the past, so I'll just keep doing the best I can and go on.

STAR WESTERN was still turning out some excellent issues in the late Forties. This one has a good cover and features stories by top-notch authors Harry F. Olmsted, E. Hoffmann Price, Talmage Powell, Jim O'Mara, Arthur Lawson, and John Jo Carpenter.

Friday, August 30, 2013

As a long-time reader and fan of Robert E. Howard's work, a
former member of REHupa, and somebody who has written introductions for several
volumes of Howard stories, you might expect me to be a strict purist, somebody
who doesn't like pastiches featuring Howard's characters and doesn't think such
things should be written. Ah, but that would be rather hypocritical of me,
considering how the majority of my career has been spent writing about other
people's characters, including my own Howard pastiche (the El Borak story
"Wolves of the Mountain" in CROSS PLAINS UNIVERSE).

So, as with most things, I come down pretty much in the middle on this issue. I
have no philosophical objections to pastiches, it's just that most of the ones
I've read based on Howard's work aren't very good.

For years, though, I've been meaning to read John C. Hocking's novel CONAN AND
THE EMERALD LOTUS, which has a pretty favorable reputation even among Howard's
most devoted fans. I believe it was Morgan Holmes who first told me that Hocking's
book is the best of the Conan pastiches published by Tor. I should have gotten
around to it long before now, especially since the author comments from time to
time on this very blog. All I can say is that I'm sorry for my procrastination
on several levels, the most important of which is that it kept me from reading
an excellent novel until now.

CONAN AND THE EMERALD LOTUS is a rare thing, a fantasy novel with a strongly
realistic tone to it. Sure, there's plenty of swordplay and sorcery, but the
tale revolves around a powerful, highly addictive drug, the sort of plot
element you might find in a hardboiled crime novel. It's been said that Howard
merged a hardboiled voice with horror fiction to create sword-and-sorcery, and
Hocking understands that even though he doesn't try to imitate Howard's style.
He spins this yarn in brisk, action-packed prose with occasional touches of
creepiness and dark humor. Conan, aligned with one of the sorcerers warring
over the potent powder known as the Emerald Lotus, is the most admirable
character in the novel, and we know what a bad-ass he is.

At the same time, Hocking gives us the sort of spectacle you expect to find in
epic heroic fantasy, especially in scenes like the description of sorcerer
Ethram-Fal's stronghold in the badlands of ancient Stygia. And speaking of
badlands, there are hints of the Western here, too, in the battles between
Conan and his enemies in rugged terrain that might well be Monument Valley,
Utah. All of it leads up to an apocalyptic and very satisfying climax.

As it turns out, CONAN AND THE EMERALD LOTUS is one of the most purely
entertaining books I've read all year. Hocking knows his stuff and knows how to
tell a fine story. I had such a good time with this I'm actually tempted to
read some of the other Conan pastiches. But that might not be such a good idea,
since I have a pretty strong hunch I've already read the best of them.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Even though I'm not the biggest fan of horror comics, I'm
still reading and enjoying the collected editions of Scott Snyder's AMERICAN
VAMPIRE, a comic that's almost as much historical fiction as it is horror.

Volume 4 collects three storylines from the comic. The first one, "The
Beast in the Cave", is a Western, a prequel story that finds Skinner
Sweet, who will later become the American Vampire of the title, and his adopted
brother and soon-to-be nemesis Jim Book fighting on the same side as U.S.
cavalrymen during the Apache Wars. As you might expect, a supernatural angle
crops up and leads to plenty of bloody violence, although things don't really
play out the way you might think they would. This arc has some nice artwork by
European comics legend Jordi Bernet that reminds me of Joe Kubert's art.

The second storyline, "Death Race", has art by series co-creator
Rafael Albuquerque and is set in California in 1954. The protagonist is a
typical teenage delinquent and hot-rodder, only as usual things aren't what
they appear. This JD has a secret that involves Skinner Sweet, and this
four-issue arc features an epic chase and battle between the two of them.

A two-parter called "The Nocturnes" rounds out this collection and
spins a yarn set in Alabama in 1954 that mixes doo-wop music, the Korean War,
and a type of monster that's new to this series. The art is by Roger Cruz and
Riccardo Burchielli.

All these stories were written by Scott Snyder, and the scripts are fast-paced,
bleak, and occasionally punctuated by some very dark humor. I think there were
too many flashbacks in "Death Race", which made the story a little
hard to follow, but overall I enjoy Snyder's work and I like this series. I'm
sure I'll continue to read these collected editions as they come out.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

It's a cliche, but in this case it's true: I sat down to glance at this book and wound up reading the whole thing. As many of you know, Kyle J. Knapp was David Cranmer's nephew who passed away earlier this summer. That makes this collection of his poetry that much more poignant, but it's powerful in its own right. Proving, I guess, that maybe noir runs in the family, many of the poems here focus on death, loss, and struggle and have a decidedly dark edge, but that's balanced with vivid, beautiful imagery and clever wordplay that leavens the tone with a bit of humor. It's compelling stuff, no doubt about that. Highly recommended.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

You've probably figured out by now that I'm a Sam Elliott fan. In this TV movie from 1986, he plays a private eye named Harry Wingate (good name for a PI) who's on the trail of a fabulously valuable opal known as the Blue Lightning. His search leads him to Australia, where he winds up tangling with a villainous former IRA gunman (played by Robert Culp), who has taken over a small settlement in the Outback. So, yeah, it plays a lot like a Western, but you don't think I'm going to complain about that, do you? I haven't seen this movie since it was new, but I remember enjoying it. The whole thing is posted on YouTube, so you can check it out for yourself, if you're of a mind to and have better Internet service than I do.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY was an early favorite pulp of mine because I came across a number of copies of it, back in the days when finding pulps in used bookstores was pretty rare in this neck of the woods. I never had this issue, but if I had I'm sure I would have enjoyed it. The lead story is by T.T. Flynn, one of my favorite pulp Western authors. I wish somebody would reprint some of his stories from the detective pulps. Other authors in this issue include Cornell Woolrich, Carroll John Daly, and Richard Wormser. Sounds good to me.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

For those of you who want to read my 300th novel but prefer a print book, the trade paperback edition is now available on Amazon. I've looked at the proof copy of this edition, and it's really nice. Livia did a great job publishing it. You can find it here.

The cover of this issue of SPEED WESTERN is a good reminder of the fact that telephones existed earlier than what we sometimes think. The stories inside are by top-notch authors, too, including William Heuman, Laurence Donovan, and William R. Cox.

Friday, August 23, 2013

It occurred to me recently that big thrillers by authors
such as Brad Thor and the late Vince Flynn featuring valiant American
intelligence agents fighting apocalyptic threats to the country are just
updated versions of the pulp novels starring Jimmy Christopher, Operator #5,
America's Undercover Ace. The biggest difference is that Jimmy Christopher
dealt with those threats at a faster pace and in about half the wordage of
today's overlong thrillers.

I'm a long-time fan of the Operator #5 series. I've written before about
discovering the Corinth paperback reprint of one of the novels, LEGIONS OF THE
DEATH MASTER, on the spinner rack at Trammell's Grocery Store in the
mid-Sixties and being won over instantly. Since Radio Archives is in the
process of reprinting the whole series as e-books, I decided to start from the
first and read the whole thing. It'll probably take me a while.

The Operator #5 novels were written at first by Frederick C. Davis under the
house-name Curtis Steele. Later on Davis would be replaced by Emile Tepperman
and Wayne Rogers. But the debut novel in the April 1934 issue, THE MASKED
INVASION, is by Davis and was written to order because publisher Harry Steeger
and editor Rogers Terrill already had the cover painting they wanted to use,
which showed the White House being blown up.

From that germ of an idea, Davis spins a wild but compelling yarn about a
masked supercriminal known as the Red Master using a new invention to cause all
electrical activity to stop in New York City, resulting in massive blackouts
that plunge the great metropolis into chaos. (This same gimmick was used in a
number of pulp novels, including the Shadow tale THE BLACK HUSH.) When the range
of this superscientific menace expands, it threatens the whole country, which
is primed to be taken over by an invasion fleet during the Thirteenth Darkness.
Only one man has a chance to stop this catastrophe . . . Jimmy Christopher, of
course.

Despite his youth (he's in his early twenties), Jimmy Christopher is already
the top intelligence agent in the country. As Will Murray points out in his
introduction to the e-book edition, Jimmy Christopher is the typical clean-cut,
square-jawed, G-man hero of the era. He's also an amateur magician and will
stop in the middle of the action to perform a trick and explain it to his young
sidekick Tim Donovan. He has a little charm shaped like a skull attached to his
watch chain, and inside it is a deadly gas. He also carries a rapier in a
sheath hidden inside his belt. He even has a secret identity, that of society
photographer Carleton Victor, although it doesn't come into play much in this
novel. Davis also establishes the tradition of always referring to him by both
names, Jimmy Christopher. It's an odd stylistic touch, but it works.

His boss and the head of the unnamed intelligence agency for which he works is
known only as Z-7. In addition to Tim Donovan, Jimmy Christopher is helped out
sometimes by his father, a retired intelligence operative who has to be careful
because a bullet is lodged near his heart, and his twin sister Nan, who
sometimes masquerades as him. That's one of the weaker points in this series,
in my opinion, but hey, unreasonably effective disguises are a pulp tradition,
after all, so we'll cut Davis some slack on that.

As the dreaded Thirteenth Darkness approaches, Davis does a fine job of piling
more and more trouble on Jimmy Christopher's head until it looks like there's
no way he or the country can survive. And yet, in a great action-filled set
piece that occupies the last fourth of the book, Jimmy Christopher finds a way
to triumph. The last time I read this story was about 35 years ago, but I still
remembered the wild climax and it was just as effective this time around. If
this was a movie, some of the stunts involved would be right at home in a
modern-day action summer blockbuster.

Despite the over-the-top apocalyptic plots and the occasional touches of pulp
silliness, Davis somehow makes his Operator #5 stories at least a little
believable. As much as I enjoy Norvell Page's crazed tales of The Spider, I
have trouble completely suspending my disbelief when I read them. Davis's
Operator #5 novels have that same hysterical edge, but they contain a touch of
plausibility that the Spider novels don't. At times they're almost eerily
predictive of our political situation now, nearly eighty years after they were
written.

After being published originally in the April 1934 issue of the pulp, as noted
above, THE MASKED INVASION was reprinted by Corinth in the Sixties (couldn't
find a scan of that cover) and a short-lived outfit called Freeway Press in the
Seventies. There was a more recent reprint from Wildside Press that's probably
still available, plus the Radio Archives e-book edition. So it's not really a
forgotten book, but I'm including it here anyway because readers of
contemporary thrillers who haven't heard of the Operator #5 series might find
something to enjoy in Jimmy Christopher's adventures. As for me, I love 'em,
and I'm looking forward to reading more.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Sure, it was a DALLAS rip-off, with two brothers trying to run their late father's ranch in modern-day Texas and clashing with his beautiful young widow, but look at that cast: Sam Elliott as a mysterious stranger, Cybill Shepherd, never more beautiful, Ken Curtis and Noah Beery Jr. as a couple of crusty old cowpokes . . . It ran one season (1983-84) and ended on a frustrating cliffhanger. But we watched 'em all anyway.

Monday, August 19, 2013

You never know what you're going to find in your email. This morning I heard from Niki Romijn, a Dutch musical theater performer who's written a show about a woman obsessed with the novels of Orrie Hitt, using the same title as one of those books, DIAL "M" FOR MAN. It's a little amazing to me that interest in Hitt's work has spread so far, and I'm proud to be part of the small circle of folks who helped start that resurgence. Here's a small excerpt from Niki's show:

Sunday, August 18, 2013

The guy with the machine gun on the cover of this one looks a little like John Wayne to me. Unfortunately, the girl's not doing much for that pith helmet. But the fiction inside looks good: stories by Albert Richard Wetjen, George Bruce, and Captain Dingle, all of them veteran action storytellers. Overall this seems a little sedate for a Fiction House pulp, but I'll bet it was fairly entertaining.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

This looks like a pretty good issue. The cover is okay, if not quite up to the same gaudy, lurid level as some of the other Fiction House pulps. But the line-up of authors is particularly strong with stories by Dan Cushman, D.B. Newton, J. Edward Leithead, and John Jo Carpenter.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Logan Handley was a gun for hire, a man feared far and wide for his speed and deadly accuracy with a Colt. But then a mysterious malady struck him down and left him a mere shell of the man he had been. Running out of time and seeking help from a famous doctor in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Logan unexpectedly finds himself in the middle of a war between two ruthless timber barons. Not only that, but a dangerous enemy from his past is stalking him as well. No longer able to rely on the fighting skills that garnered him a reputation as a notorious gunman, Logan has to figure out a way to save himself and his new-found friends from violence and tragedy.

DANCING WITH DEAD MEN is the milestone 300th novel from legendary New York Times bestselling author James Reasoner. Part Western, part historical novel, part psychological thriller, it's packed with stirring action and compelling characterization. DANCING WITH DEAD MEN is a masterful tale by one of the top storytellers of our time!

Never before published, full-length 64,000 word novel.

Well, shucks. That sales copy makes me blush a mite. Now let me tell you the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey used to say.

About 25 years ago when I was working for Book Creations Inc., I was one of the regular stable of authors turning out novels for their series Stagecoach Station, which was published by Bantam under the house-name Hank Mitchum. All the books used a place name as their title. I wrote books called PECOS, PANHANDLE, DEATH VALLEY, etc. As usual when working on a series, Livia and I came up with more ideas than I ever got around to using. She gave me the title HOT SPRINGS and the basics of a plot, which I expanded into a pretty detailed outline that I sent to BCI. But for one reason or another (the editor probably switched me to another series, but I don't really recall), it never got scheduled as a Stagecoach Station book, and then that series ended.

So the outline sat in our files, retitled DANCING WITH DEAD MEN because we thought that one of these days one of us would write it as a stand-alone Western novel. The file was written on a Laser computer and stored on one of those big floppy disks. At some point Livia converted a lot of those files, and a copy of it was sitting on the flash drive that was in her purse on January 29, 2008, when a wildfire burned down our house and studio. Because of that, the outline was one of the things we didn't lose.

So as I was coming up on my 300th novel, I started casting around for something good to write. My 100th and 200th novels were both house-name Westerns. I wanted #300 to be something under my name. I considered a number of different projects but finally decided I ought to finally take a crack at DANCING WITH DEAD MEN. After all, it had been waiting longer than anything else.

And now it's available at Amazon and Smashwords and in the works at Barnes & Noble, a brand-new novel that only took me 25 years to write! I think it turned out to be a good book, and I'm proud to have it be my 300th novel. I don't normally post samples, but here's the opening:

Christmas
Eve, 1873

The killing had
stopped for the holidays. For months the two rival mining syndicates, the
Rimfire on one side and the Aldena on the other, had been battling, each side
blaming the other – correctly, as it happened – for the rash of robberies,
sabotage, and outright murder that had plagued the area around Aspen Creek,
Montana Territory.

But tonight, the
night before the holiest day of the year, hostilities had ceased. For one
night, the war over the gold fields had been put aside, and everyone from the
area, townspeople, miners, and ranchers alike, had come together in the Aspen
Creek town hall for the annual Christmas dance. The weather had even cooperated.
It was cold, but not too cold for late December in Montana Territory, and only
a light dusting of snow lay on the ground.

Inside the town hall,
the air was hot and stifling. The heat came from the pot-bellied stoves in the
corners and also from the several hundred people who had crowded into the
building for the festivities.

Logan Handley didn't
care much for the heat. A few beads of sweat had popped out on his forehead. He
had been sick with a fever recently, and even though he seemed to be over it,
he didn't feel like he had recovered completely.

A tall, lean man with
close-cropped sandy hair, Logan was better dressed than most of the men in the
hall. His frock coat, vest, and string tie would have been fashionable even
back east. His lone concessions to Western fashion were the high-topped black
boots he wore and the flat-crowned black hat with a silver band that hung on
one of the hat trees near the hall's entrance.

He paused at the
table on one side of the crowded room to pick up a cup of punch. Before the
night was over, somebody would spike that punch, more than likely, but for now
it was innocent enough, and Logan enjoyed the cool sweetness as he took a sip.

"Well, lookee
there. Standin' around and drinkin' punch like he ain't a cold-blooded
killer."

Logan had a pretty
good idea who had spoken, but he looked around to be sure. He nodded to the
stocky, walrus-mustached man and said, "Merry Christmas, Marshal."

"Maybe it will
be, if you hired guns'll behave yourselves," Marshal Floyd Mahaffey said.
The badge he wore as city marshal of Aspen Creek gleamed on the lapel of his
brown tweed suit coat.

Logan had the cup of
punch in his right hand, a cautious habit since he was left-handed. He moved
his left hand in a graceful gesture and said, "Do you see me wearing a
gun?"

"Not right
now," Mahaffey admitted. "I'll bet it's out there in one of the
baskets, though."

Well, that much was
true, thought Logan. He had unbuckled the black leather shell belt and attached
holster with its new .45 caliber Colt Single Action Army revolver and left them
in one of the baskets that had been set out on chairs in the foyer. A couple of
the marshal's deputies, each armed with a shotgun, stood beside those baskets
and made sure that every man who came into the town hall deposited his weapons
in one of them before entering. Those guns could only be reclaimed when a
fellow left the dance.

The deputies weren't
exactly diligent in their duty, though. Logan had a .41 caliber over-and-under
derringer in his vest pocket, and he would have bet good money it wasn't the
only hide-out gun in the hall tonight.

But as long as nobody
used any of those hidden weapons, things would remain peaceful. The musicians
sawed on their fiddles, people danced and sang Christmas carols and drank
punch, young men and women flirted with each other, kids ran around and got
underfoot. Everything was as normal as it could be, and that was a refreshing
change for Logan.

For men such as him,
normal was lonely trails, smoky saloons, squalid cribs . . . and unmarked, unmourned
graves.

"John Purcell
appears to be havin' a good time tonight," Mahaffey went on. His dislike
for gunmen meant it cost him an obvious effort to be civil to the likes of
Logan Handley, but he made that effort.

Logan nodded as his
eyes sought out Purcell. The local superintendent of the Rimfire Mining
Syndicate – and as such, Logan's employer – was dancing with his wife Bedelia.
Over on the other side of the room, Clete Barrows, who ran the Aldena, danced
with his wife. The two bitter enemies
determinedly ignored each other while at the same time making sure as much
space as possible separated them. That was wise, Logan thought. An accidental
bump on the dance floor might shatter the fragile holiday truce.

"John deserves
to have a good time," Logan said. "All that mischief by the Aldena
has put a lot of pressure on him. Rimfire's owners don't care what obstacles he
has to overcome. All that matters to them is production."

Mahaffey let out a
disgusted snort. "Don't talk to
me about what Barrows' men have been doin'. You Rimfire men have been makin'
life hell for his operation, too. If there was room in the town cemetery, I'd
say all of you oughta just go ahead and kill each other and be done with
it."

Logan smiled faintly
and took another sip of the punch. "It's Christmas
Eve, Marshal. No killing tonight."

Mahaffey made another
disgusted noise, shook his head, and started to turn away. He paused to look
back at Logan and said, "I don't see your pard Meadows here."

Logan stiffened. He
said, "Jim Meadows is no pard of mine. You know that."

Mahaffey shrugged. "He may work for
Barrows while you work for Purcell, but you and him are the same stripe, I'm
thinkin'."

The lawman's stumpy
legs carried him into the crowd. Logan looked down into the red liquid remaining
in his cup and frowned. He didn't like being told that he was the same sort as
Jim Meadows, but he supposed it was true, at least in a basic sense. Both of
them hired out their guns to whoever offered the biggest payoff.

And they had never
been too careful about picking sides, either. There was no moral high ground to
claim in this dispute between the Rimfire and the Aldena. It had been the same
in other places, other times, when disputes boiled over into gunplay and
bloodshed. There had even been a few instances when Logan and Jim Meadows had
found themselves riding for the same side.

Logan wanted to call
Mahaffey back and insist to the marshal that he and Meadows were different,
that Meadows was a snake-blooded killer while he, Logan, at least had a few
scruples.

During the Thirties, L. Ron Hubbard wrote in just about pulp
genre that existed. “Spy Killer”, from the April 1936 issue of FIVE-NOVELS
MONTHLY, is a short novel of Oriental intrigue reminiscent of some stories I’ve
read by H. Bedford-Jones. Two-fisted American
sailor Kurt Reid is framed for murder when his ship docks in Shanghai. He’s helped to escape by a Chinese warlord
who demands in return that Reid assassinate a mysterious Japanese spy. Throw in a beautiful White Russian
adventuress and the equally beautiful daughter of a British merchant, each of
them with agendas of their own, a few double-crosses, the Japanese army, and
Reid is up to his neck in trouble. I
don’t think this yarn is quite as good as the Westerns I've read by Hubbard,
but it’s still pretty entertaining.

The scan of the original pulp issue is from the invaluable Fictionmags Index. It's from a damaged copy but the only image I could find on-line.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

I've been reading and enjoying Keith Chapman's Westerns written under the name Chap O'Keefe for several years, but his recent e-book WITCHERY: A DUO OF WEIRD TALES proves that he does a top-notch job with other genres as well. After an interesting introduction that addresses the genesis of these tales, he produces a fine Clark Ashton Smith pastiche set in Smith's evil-haunted French province Averoigne, "Black Art in Yvones". A young protagonist, a beautiful blonde, and a sinister femme fetale even give this tale a slight noirish feel. In the second novelette in this collection, Chapman ventures into sword-and-sorcery territory with "Wildblood and the Witch Wife", featuring a very likable pair of adventurers reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It's set in historical England rather than a fantasy world, but there's still plenty of sorcery and action.These are excellent stories and I'm looking forward to more fantasy from Chapman. In the meantime, this duo is well worth the very affordable price.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The pilot for this Western series was shown as a TV movie in the spring of 1976, and then it premiered as a regular series the following fall. Unfortunately it didn't last very long, airing only about a dozen episodes before it was cancelled. It had a good cast, with Kurt Russell and Tim Matheson playing brothers searching for their sister, who had been captured by Cheyenne Indians. Russell's character was also a captive for several years. Being Western fans, Livia and I watched all the episodes, and even though I haven't seen any of them since then, I remember it as being a pretty good series. The pilot movie and a two-parter from the series have been released on DVD, but the whole series hasn't. There are a few clips on YouTube, but that's it.

Monday, August 12, 2013

I've been so involved with genre fiction for so long that I
tend to forget that I once read a lot of literary fiction, too. (Of course,
literary fiction is a genre of its own, but that's probably a discussion best
left for another time and place.) What it's always boiled down to for me is
that a good story is a good story, no matter what cubbyhole people try to put
it in.

The Lowestoft Chronicle is an on-line literary magazine run by Nicholas
Litchfield that publishes fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, usually (but not
always) with a travel theme. It branches out from time to time into other
areas, such as theseinterviews with me. Nicholas Litchfield did a great job
with them, and I'm glad that the first one has been reprinted in INTREPID
TRAVELERS, a fine new anthology showcasing some of the pieces published in the
magazine in 2012. There are two more interviews in this volume, one with
bestselling travel author Franz Wisner and the other with Randal S. Brandt,
librarian and expert on the life and works of mystery author David Dodge, who
also did a considerable amount of travel writing. Both interviews are
entertaining and informative.

I'm absolutely the most unqualified person in the world to talk about poetry
(the closest I ever came to writing any was the lyrics to an unrecorded country
song that popped into my head one day). Let's just say that I enjoyed the poems
in INTREPID TRAVELERS. I can talk about the fiction, though, and it's all good.
Some favorites are "Cracked Windshield" by Tamara Kaye Sellman, a
story about a young woman who delivers cars from one side of the country to the
other that felt to me like it ought to be the opening chapter of a novel;
"Bloody Driving Gloves" by Hector S. Koburn, a short, potent, noirish
crime yarn; and "The Final Ascent of Hal Tripp" by David Klein, a
tale about climbing Mount Everest that strikes a Kilimanjaro-esque note
although the plot is very different from the Hemingway story. I really liked
the writing in all of these. There's also the supremely silly "You and I
Have Something in Common" by Brian Conlon, which is about a very bizarre
job interview.

More than anything else, INTREPID TRAVELERS is refreshing. It's well-written,
takes the reader to a wide variety of literary destinations, and makes even a
confirmed hermit like me want to get up and go somewhere. Highly recommended.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

The Western pulps weren't the only ones that liked bright red and yellow covers. This is the first issue of a short-lived pulp called ADVENTURE TRAILS, which certainly promises plenty of action and excitement. The only author in this issue I'm really familiar with is Eugene Cunningham. But then a little investigation turns up the fact that "Rodney Blake" was really none other than my old favorite H. Bedford-Jones. I don't think I knew this before now. Bedford-Jones used the pseudonym on at least a dozen stories, most of them Westerns that appeared in lower-tier pulps. For that reason alone I'd grab this one if I ever saw a copy of it, which isn't that likely.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

This is an issue that I own and read recently, and as usual
with these, the scan is from the actual copy I read. The cover by H.W. Scott
isn't as good as others I've seen by him, but it's serviceable.

By the 1940s, Walt Coburn's work had become more inconsistent,
but most of his stories were still pretty good, especially the ones that
appeared in WESTERN STORY, the dean of Western pulps. The lead novella in this
issue, "Come All You Texas Rangers" isn't set in Texas, as you might
expect, but rather in Montana. Its protagonist is the son of a Texas Ranger,
however, and the roots of the story go back to Texas, where a herd of cattle
was rustled from Bill Loren's father and driven north. Bill is trying to track
down the rustlers and is posing as a riverboat gambler to do so, and as the
story opens he's about to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit. From there
Coburn springs plot twist after plot twist, most of which don't come from too
far out in left field, before wrapping things up with a nice showdown between
Bill and his sidekick, an old mountain man known as Shale, and the two main
villains of the piece. "Come All You Texas Rangers" isn't in the top
rank of Coburn's work – it has a certain air of by-the-numbers about it – but
it's an entertaining yarn.

Perry Westwood's "Guns by Proxy" makes use of a very standard plot,
that of the drifting gunman who saves a small rancher and his family from a
rapacious cattle baron, but it's well written with plenty of good action. I
don't know anything about Westwood, but something about his prose that's hard
to pin down makes me think he might have been British. His style reminds me a
little of some of the British Western authors who have written for the Black
Horse Western line.

Tom Roan is an author whose work I've found to be inconsistent, but his short
story in this issue, "Blizzard Justice", is a good one. A young
cowboy breaks out of jail during a snowstorm to solve the murder for which he's
been framed and winds up snowbound in a line shack with a dangerous assortment
of characters. Coincidence maybe drives the plot a little too much, but Roan
keeps things ripping along at a good pace.

Seth Ranger was really Frank Richardson Pierce, a fine writer who was prolific
in the Western pulps under both of those names. His story of an old desert rat
prospector, "Hard to Kill", is something of an oddity in that it's
set partially in the Old West and partially in more modern times. It's a good
yarn, too, about land development and a crooked developer, the sort of thing
that Pierce did about as well as anyone in the Western pulps.

"Caribou Trek" is a wildlife story about a caribou bull trying to
escape from a pack of wolves. While the author, Jim Kjelgaard, was quite
possibly the best at this story of story and this particular one reads pretty
well, I'm still not a big fan of the sub-genre.

"Secret of the Frying Pan" by Mojave Lloyd is a mystery story, with a
murder to solve and a hidden map that leads to a valuable mine. The hero is a
tinker who has invented a whistle he wears on his nose. Really. This one is
just a little too offbeat for me and I didn't care for the author's style, but
I'll admit that the plot had a nice twist.

Also in this issue are an installment of a serial by Walker Tompkins,
"Wagon Wheels West", and the usual WESTERN STORY features about guns,
mining, and travel and a pen-pal column, none of which I read.

My overall verdict is that this is a slightly below average issue of WESTERN
STORY. The Coburn and Pierce stories are good, the Roan and Westwood stories
are not as good but still enjoyable, and the other contents pretty forgettable.
But I still had a good time reading it.

Friday, August 09, 2013

When I was a kid I loved the science fiction novels
published by the John C. Winston Company, many of which were available on the
bookmobile that came out to my little hometown every Saturday from the public
library in the county seat. How could I not love them? I mean, look at that
classic endpaper painting by Alex Schomburg! I read all of them I could get my
hands on, beginning with, as I recall, THE YEAR THE STARDUST FELL by Raymond F.
Jones. Although my first one could have been the iconic DANGER: DINOSAURS! by
Richard Marsten, who was Evan Hunter, of course. I can't remember for sure.

But one I'm certain I never read was VANDALS OF THE VOID by Jack Vance, and since
this is Jack Vance Week on Forgotten Books, why not? Well, for one thing,
copies of the original edition can be found easily on-line, but they ain't
cheap. As in a couple of hundred bucks not cheap. Luckily, there's a Kindle
edition which is very inexpensive considering the alternative. It doesn't have
those great endpapers, of course, but I was able to read the book itself.

The protagonist of VANDALS OF THE VOID is Dick Murdock, the teenage son of an
astronomer. Despite being of Terran heritage, Dick was born and raised on
Venus. He gets to leave the planet for the first time when he goes to visit his
father at an observatory on Earth's Moon. On the way he sees a disabled
spaceship with everyone on board dead and hears about a dreaded space pirate
known as the Basilisk who is thought to be to blame for the atrocity. Once he
gets to the Moon he meets an old prospector who claims that the remnants of a
race of lunar natives still live in caves deep under the surface. That's more
than enough to draw me in, but there are more plot twists still to come, as a
murder takes place and Dick is forced to turn detective to expose the killer
and save his own life.

There's almost a frontier feel to this novel, since space travel has progressed
only as far as Terran colonies on Mars and Venus and is actually fairly
primitive. I don't mind a big sprawling galactic empire space opera once in a
while, but I really like this sort of smaller scale story, too.

I would have absolutely loved this book when I was twelve years old. Heck, I
enjoyed it a lot now, and I'm considerably older than twelve. Unlike many of
you, I haven't read a great deal of Jack Vance's work. I've enjoyed what I've
read, he's just one of those authors I've never sampled extensively. In the
reviews of this one I've read by Vance fans, there are a lot of comments about
how it's one of his early novels and his later books are much better written,
but I've got to say, I think VANDALS OF THE VOID is very well written, with a
smart plot, a refreshingly realistic and likable protagonist, and plenty of
excitement. I had a great time reading it.

I may have to see if any of those other Winston SF novels are available as
e-books.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Most of you probably know what a huge fan I am of writer/artist Stan Lynde and his long-running comic strip RICK O'SHAY. I'm very sorry to report that Stan has passed away from cancer at the age of 81. His obituary in the Washington Post can be found here. I'm glad I got to know him and had a chance to tell him how much his work meant to me. Somewhere Hipshot Percussion is looking up at a snow-capped mountain and telling his ol' pard so long.

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

(This post originally appeared in somewhat different form on December 12, 2004.)

Tonight we watched VAN HELSING. A fairly entertaining movie, I thought, but boy, is it frantic. Running, jumping, shooting, fighting monsters, getting in all the scenes that'll work to adapt for the video game, piling on the CGI and special effects . . . Well, it just wore me out after a while. Some REH fans think that the movie stole Hugh Jackman's look from Solomon Kane, and I can see that with the big hat and the black duster. That's all that seemed Howard-influenced to me, though. Kate Beckinsale looks great, especially in the first shot where we see her, when she's drawing her sword. My biggest problem with the movie is the legacy of Mel Brooks. Every time somebody calls Igor by name, I halfway expected him to say, "That's EYE-gor!" And of course I kept thinking that the Frankenstein Monster was going to break into a chorus of "Puttin' on the Ritz".

Ah, well . . . I think I've seen all of Stephen Sommers' films. Each one has gotten more elaborate and piled on the special effects, and each one has been a little weaker than the one before it, in my opinion. I liked THE JUNGLE BOOK a lot and loved THE MUMMY. Sommers just needs to have his characters take a breath now and then and try to work in a little more actual story. But then, who am I to be telling anybody how to make movies?

Monday, August 05, 2013

This has been such a busy year
that I've fallen behind on my Fight Card reading, a situation I'm going to
attempt to remedy, beginning with RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE, written under the Jack
Tunney house-name by David James Foster, who contributed the first international
entry in the series, KING OF THE OUTBACK. In this excellent yarn, boxer Brendan
O'Toole, haunted by tragedy and seeking refuge in the bottle, winds up working
on a construction crew building a hotel in an African country wracked by
revolution. When the Americans are captured by rebel forces, they're tossed
into a jungle prison camp known as Hell Camp XXI, which is under the command of
a brutal ex-Nazi who stages boxing matches between the prisoners and a giant
guard.

If that plot set-up doesn't pull you right into the story, you're made of
sterner stuff than I am. Foster does a fine job with the action as the
prisoners try to survive and O'Toole has to step back into the ring several
times. The boxing scenes are great and Foster keeps the tension building to a
satisfying conclusion. This volume is a good reminder of just how entertaining
the Fight Card series is, and I hope I can get caught up on it soon. In the
meantime, if you haven't read this one, you should give it a try.

Sunday, August 04, 2013

This appears to have been the only issue of this pulp, but it has a good cover and one of the best adventure writers in J. Allan Dunn. I'm not familiar with the other authors, but I'm sure they're pretty good, too. Just another example of too many pulps on the newsstands for all of them to survive.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

This is really a prototypical Western pulp from the Thrilling Group. A nice cover by Sam Cherry, and stories by Oscar J. Friend, Larry Harris, Johnston McCulley, a Sheriff Blue Steele yarn by Tom Gunn (really Syl McDowell), and a Buffalo Billy Bates story by Scott Carleton (a house-name, maybe Walker Tompkins). I'd read this one for sure. And I may someday, because I think I own a copy of it, but I can't guarantee that.

Friday, August 02, 2013

The
Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Awards Banquet will be Friday night, Sept.
20th, starting at 6:30 PM, in Albany, NY the same weekend as Bouchercon. The
event is open to the public. You need not be a PWA member to attend. Come rub
elbows with your favorite writers. For questions and ticket information email
RRandisi@aol.com.

(I've only been able to attend one PWA banquet, but it was a lot of fun. If you're going to be close to Albany in September, you ought to check this out.)

This entry in Ben Haas's superb Fargo series finds
soldier of fortune Neal Fargo in the Pacific Northwest. As a favor to his old
friend, former president Theodore Roosevelt, Fargo signs on to help a timber
company get a huge shipment of logs downriver to Puget Sound. A rival company
will stop at nothing, up to and including sabotage and murder, to stop that
from happening. But the bad guys hadn't reckoned on Fargo.

If you want to learn something about logging in the early 20th
Century, this is the book for you. Haas obviously knew a lot about the subject
and communicates it in clear, easy to understand prose. This is no dry
educational tract, though, because Haas mixes in the background with plenty of
action scenes, and nobody, with the possible exception of Robert E. Howard,
ever wrote action btter than Ben Haas. Shootouts, epic fistfights, a desperate
duel with axes, large scale gun battles, forest fires, and millions of tons of
logs rampaging down a flooded river . . . well, you get the idea.

And of course I loved every bit of it. The Fargo series is one of my all-time
favorites. My only quibble about it is that Haas spends a little too much time
in each book filling in Fargo's background and going over the weapons he
carries. But that's a very minor point. The offbeat settings and plots, the
relentless pace, and the smooth, action-packed prose much more than make up for
it. Great stuff, and if you haven't read any of the Fargo books, you should.

Thursday, August 01, 2013

In a comment on an earlier post, Jeff Meyerson reminded me that I haven't posted any writing updates for a while, so the first day of the month seems like a good time to resume. Unfortunately, today was my first day off from writing in a couple of weeks, so I have no pages to report. I can mention, though, that June was my most productive month ever, with 707 pages written. That's the first time I've hit the 700 mark after coming close a couple of times in the past. Then I followed that up with exactly 500 pages in July. For the year I'm 12 pages off a 6000-page pace, so I've got a good shot at achieving that. I've hit 6000 twice before and would like to again. Mainly, though, I just want to get a million words done again. If I do that this year and next year, that'll make 10 years in a row. Has anybody ever written a million words a year for 10 straight years? I don't know, but it seems likely Walter B. Gibson did when he was writing two Shadow novels a month and a bunch of other stuff besides. Frederick Faust might have. It can't have been done too many times, though.Of course, all this talk about pages and words doesn't mean anything unless the work is good. I think I'm doing a pretty good job most of the time, but the final decision on that is up to somebody other than me.Tomorrow it's back to work.

Mark Ellis is best known for his science fiction and
action/adventure work (he's the creator of the highly successful series
OUTLANDERS and served as its principal writer for many years) and for his
excellent comic book scripts for THE WILD, WILD WEST, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.,
and THE JUSTICE MACHINE, among many others. But he started out to be a
hardboiled crime writer, as he explains in this post on his blog, and he's
reviving those early efforts, starting with the excellent novella "Rag
Baby".

Bonaparte "Bone" Mizell is a retired DEA agent, security consultant,
and unofficial private eye who's hired by a strip club owner and gangster to
deal with a blackmailer. Soon enough, in classic hardboiled fashion, Bone finds
himself involved in a twisty yarn including murder, drugs, and a deranged Iraq
war vet who seems to have come back from the dead. The plot has enough
surprises to be effective, but where Ellis really shines is in the relentless
pacing of the story, the vivid depiction of its scruffy central Florida
setting, and its rugged, likable hero. I suspect Bone Mizell will be making a
return appearance in the future, and I'm certainly looking forward to reading
more about him. For now, if you're a fan of hardboiled crime fiction, I
recommend you check out "Rag Baby", which is available in a very
affordable e-book edition.